€9.6M/Year in a Business of Guided Tours with Activity throughout the Iberian Peninsula

Company: LIVING TOURS

〉〉 Sector: Tourism

〉〉 Initial Investment: 20K€

〉〉 Billing: 800K€/month pre-covid/(Post-covid: 40%)

〉〉 Facebook: 5K; Instagram: 1.1K;

Hi! Tell us a little about yourself and your business?

My name is Rui Terroso, I am the CEO and Founder of Living Tours, I have a degree, postgraduate degree and an MBA in Management, I am married, I have 2 children and 2 dogs, I am dyslexic like my 2 children, a reading and writing disorder that brings us some added difficulties but with other valences in terms of creativity, innovation, among others. My purpose in life is to experience the world, a purpose that led me to create Living Tours in 2004, an Incoming Tour Operator for Portugal and later extended to the whole of Spain.

Since our foundation, our objective has been to show the world (tourists who visit us) the best we have, are and know how to do in Portugal and Spain.

We work on several fronts throughout the Iberian Peninsula, from our own Tours and Transfers operation, to the face-to-face Receptive Agencies in Porto and Lisbon, to the DMC's and Events - Porto, Lisbon and Barcelona, to our Online/Marketplace platform with + 2500 Tours, Activities and Experiences throughout the mainland Iberian Peninsula and Islands, and we still have many ideas and projects to carry out.

We are practitioners of conscious capitalism and we care about society and our Environmental Footprint. Through entrepreneurship we want to leave a legacy of a better country, a fairer, more inclusive, cleaner and more balanced country! We support several social causes, the main one being: - Livingtourianos com Causa: 1 for 1 - where we donate a meal for each participant in our tours, to the homeless and needy in Porto, Lisbon and Coimbra through 3 social solidarity institutions.

We have other causes, such as raising food every 2 months, cleaning the beaches, supporting births, 1 extra day of vacation for all livingtourian blood donors, among other social causes that we carry out with our local communities.

Our annual pre-covid turnover was around €10M, with a team reaching 100 employees, with more than 250,000 customers per year, both B2B & B2C, from all over the world. We have an annual participation and presence in the main fairs and workshops worldwide with Turismo de Portugal and the Gray Line Brand that we represent.

What is your background and how did the idea for this business come about?

I always had the will or the idea that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I just didn't know what, maybe because of the influence of my father who also created his own successful company to this day or also an effect of dyslexia given so many entrepreneurs in the world of dyslexic entrepreneurship!

So since my 1st salary I started working in my parents' company, like my brothers and after college, my concern was to gather my nest egg to be able to make my own business happen!

I had 3 business ideas when I finished college in 2000, with financial viability plans, etc. carried out: the 1st was an e-commerce for selling wines online for restaurants or others, it could have been an excellent option. The 2nd was the door-to-door distribution at dawn of newspapers and magazines by subscription, on physical paper, an American and Japanese model that was on the rise at the time, but which today would only have survived online or would not have been viable and the 3rd, a business related to tourism, perhaps the most difficult given the lack of tourism in Porto at the time, there were still no Low-cost airlines operating in the city and in Portugal and tourism was very residual.

But it was my purpose and the taste for traveling to experience the world that led me to create a company of guided tours to the historical cultural heritage of Porto and Northern Portugal with the 1st name: Living in Portugal - Animação Turística Lda, later extended throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

Therefore, I am a complete outsider in tourism, I studied Management and never worked in tourism before creating Living Tours, like my former founding partner and my best friend from college, who despite having separated the companies we had, we continued to be the best friends and partners.

“We always rely on word of mouth, this was our strategy, as we didn't have the money to invest in marketing! With good reviews and satisfied customers, this word of mouth over time generates results, and without investment costs, it will attract more and more satisfied people!”

The idea of tourism arose in the penultimate year of college and once again the result of dyslexia, which makes it difficult to learn English due to the phonemes that the English language leads, so I went to a family home and to a school in Dublin, Ireland ( cheaper than in London) to learn and improve English on your own. It was in Dublin that I came across some expressive tourism with guided tours, from walking tours, bike tours, to double-decker tourist buses, something completely non-existent in Porto and Portugal in 1999.

I began to outline the first tours and guided visits and to carry out the first meetings and interviews with hotel directors and receptionists, trying to understand if there was space and need for a company that would satisfy such or such needs and it seemed to me that there was a need and an unresolved problem was when I started to define and create from the name, the company logo, how it should work, the business model in its entirety.

As I was still working in my parents' company, and I couldn't leave the company and dedicate myself 100% to the business, I presented the project to my best friend from college who believed and accepted to be my partner and so we started the foundation of Living Tours .

We had some route mistakes, like our first tour, we had a 50 seater bus rented in the expectation that we would start big and we couldn't reject reservations. We only had 4 tourists, which at the start of the tour went to 6, while the guide was visiting the Cathedral we went with the driver to pick up the other 2 tourists, in total 6 tourists, plus the driver the guide and us who went to accompany the tour to make sure everything would go for the best!